The selected poems of Donald Hall

Hall, onetime U.S. Poet Laureate, has been publishing careful, plainspoken poems since the 1950s, but his real powers showed up later. In the 1970s he settled with poet Jane Kenyon in a New Hampshire farmhouse to chronicle rural New England and its history, its "little mountain valleys and brooks." After Kenyon's death in 1995, Hall's lines shot forth with the bleak energy of grief, sometimes scarily sad, sometimes deceptively pedestrian ("Ordinary days were best,/ when we worked over poems/ in our separate rooms"). The laments, the complaints, the bittersweet recollections of tough times, and the sweeter depictions of roses and maple syrup, quiet mountains, and "Connecticut suburbs/ where I grew up" all return here in this fine introduction to a poet who has tried hard to be America's Horace: a learned exponent of humble, retired life. Hall's best work combines these goals with a very dry humor, an almost too-mild regret; much of it stretches out over pages at an unrhymed, close-cut, dignified length. Hall has announced that he no longer writes poetry (though he still writes essays), so this more severe cull (compared to 2006's White Apples and the Taste of Stone) parades the poems he most wants to preserve: the culling itself may attract attention, but so will Hall's own understated gifts. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

My Son My Executioner   My son, my executioner,     I take you in my arms, Quiet and small and just astir     And whom my body warms.   Sweet death, small son, our instrument     Of immortality, Your cries and hungers document     Our bodily decay.   We twenty-five and twenty-two,     Who seemed to live forever, Observe enduring life in you     And start to die together.     The Sleeping Giant a hill in Connecticut   The whole day long, under the walking sun That poised an eye on me from its high floor, Holding my toy beside the clapboard house I looked for him, the summer I was four.   I was afraid the waking arm would break From the loose earth and rub against his eyes A fist of trees, and the whole country tremble In the exultant labor of his rise;   Then he with giant steps in the small streets Would stagger, cutting off the sky, to seize The roofs from house and home because we had Covered his shape with dirt and planted trees;   And then kneel down and rip with fingernails A trench to pour the enemy Atlantic Into our basin, and the water rush, With the streets full and all the voices frantic.   That was the summer I expected him. Later the high and watchful sun instead Walked low behind the house, and school began, And winter pulled a sheet over his head.   The Lone Ranger   Anarchic badlands spread without a road, And from the river west no turned-up loam; No farmer prayed for rain, no settler's horse But one time blundered riderless to home.   Unfriendly birds would gather in the air, A circling kind of tombstone. As for the law, No marshal lived for long unless he could Defeat his mirror'd image to the draw.   So now he rode upon a silver horse. He stood for law and order. Anarchy Like flood or fire roared through every gate But he and Tonto hid behind a tree   And when the bandits met to split the loot, He blocked the door. With silver guns he shot The quick six-shooters from their snatching hands And took them off to jail and let them rot.   For him the badlands were his mother's face. He made an order where all order lacked From Hanged Boy Junction to the Rio Grande. Why did he wear a mask? He was abstract. Excerpted from The Selected Poems of Donald Hall by Donald Hall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.